“Remember that great line from 1984? ‘If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on the human face—forever.’ The way I look at these recent revelations about our surveillance capacities—I think that what’s been revealed to us, essentially, is the boot of the future. This massive surveillance/intelligence system, documented by Snowden and others—this is the boot of the future. And the question is going to be, eventually, who wears the boot?”
Quietly composed for France’s Fata Morgana Press in the aftermath of The Kindly Ones—a monumental study on human baseness and Nazism—Mr. Littell’s new book at first appears to bear little resemblance to its precursor. Where The Kindly Ones is an exuberant historical novel, a 992-page behemoth of rape, incest, and murder, The Fata Morgana Books is a spare, 184-page collection of four short novellas, comparatively light, until the end, on physical violence, and stripped of the ornamental graces of period, geographical location, name, gender…
Hell is oneself. Or, if you like, Hell is other people. Either way, Hell’s Modernist vanguard—let’s say Beckett, Sartre, and Eliot—moiled in darkness long enough to recover the bad news and bring it to daylight…
As an edifice built to stupefy and alienate the reader, Taipei is something to behold. It is like a hall of mirrors where the visitor’s reflection eliminates any trace of her original affect, where a smile is thrown back as an anesthetized mouth…
At best willing only to consume, to rifle through trash on her Kindle, ready to relinquish her final moments of quietude to the noise of visual culture, the reader is whispered about as an aphasic oldster awaiting euthanasia…
Henrytown is shot through with a kind of literary mantra: Fathers are dead! Long live Fathers!
In fact, if contemporary finance is analogous to something in literature, it isn’t symbolist poetry but theory itself. Denationalized, decontextualized, divorced from its origins in philosophy and criticism, theory has assumed totally deregulated positions on everything from literature to politics and beyond…
